


A Piece Of History

by Sixthlight



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, Queer History, Spoilers for Foxglove Summer, implied Thomas Nightingale/David Mellenby, mentioned Peter Grant/Beverley Brook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 17:55:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3701329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“But <i>why</i> were you looking at a display on London’s gay scene in the 1920s?” Lesley demanded as we walked up the library steps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Piece Of History

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an anon prompt on Tumblr (thanks, anon, whoever you are):
> 
> "re: nightingale/the roaring twenties, imagine peter for, whatever reason, coming across vintage photos of london’s pre-war queer scene and noticing this one sharp-dressed young man who looks suspiciously familiar and trying to come up with a way to inconspicuously ask nightingale about it"

“But  _why_  were you looking at a display on London’s gay scene in the 1920s?” Lesley demanded as we walked up the library steps. It’d been a while since I’d been to a public library - the sort of stuff we needed to look up didn’t tend to be found there - but in this instance there’d been a local history question and I couldn’t track down anything on the internet  _or_  in the Folly library.  

“Because it was there?” I said. “I told you I had to go to the library because -”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said, “but, Peter, only you would go into a library to look at their local history stuff and stop to look at the  _displays_. Nobody goes into the library and reads the displays.” 

“That’s what they’re there for,” I retorted. “So people can learn new and interesting things. It’s part of the wonderful world of ongoing public education.” 

Lesley patted my arm. “Look, just show me this photo and I’ll tell you you are, in fact, going bonkers, and then we can get on with our actual jobs.” 

I led her over to the display in question, which told the passer-by many fascinating things about the LGBT scene in London during the Roaring Twenties, and recommended further reading for those whose interest had been caught. Someone - presumably a librarian - had dug up some vintage photos, taken in clubs at the time. You’d think there wouldn’t be any, given exactly how illegal most of the associated behaviour had been – for men anyway - but then again the photos weren’t in and of themselves evidence of anything, generally. It was all in the context. Anyway, one of them had caught  _my_ attention, because I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I thought I was seeing. 

“Here,” I said, pointing. 

“Oh, come on,” Lesley said, “it doesn’t -” 

She broke off, and leaned in a little closer. The skin above her mask creased in the way that meant she was frowning. “Actually…it  _does_  look like him, doesn’t it?” 

The man on the far right of the photo - beautifully dressed in the style of the era, smiling, with his arm around the waist of the guy next to him, which like I said wasn’t evidence of anything but I supposed was a bit suggestive - was a dead ringer for Nightingale. Or a younger, happier version of Nightingale, anyway. 

“Told you so,” I said. 

“He did mention four brothers,” Lesley said dubiously. “Could be one of them.”

“Nineteen twenty-five,” I said, pointing at the photo’s caption. “He’d have been mid-twenties. Just the right age to be out partying. It’s him, I bet you.”

“So why do you  _care_?” she wanted to know. “It’s not like he goes out clubbing these days - or like it’d be any of our business if he did.”

As much as I hated to admit it, she did have a point. “He just…he never talks about it, you know? His life before…before the war. And then _this_.”

“If you keep going on like this I’m going to think you have a thing for him,” Lesley said in matter-of-fact tones that were belied by the sharp glance she gave me. 

Everything I could say to that was going to be wrong, so I didn’t say anything. Of course, that was wrong too. 

“Oh, for -” she said after a few silent seconds, then pulled out her phone and took a picture of the offending photo. “Just show this to him and  _ask_. I bet he’d tell you.”

“Why don’t  _you_  ask?” I said, because I had no intention of doing any such thing. Talk about an awkward conversation.

“Because,” said Lesley, “I’m not the one who wants to know.”

Sod Lesley and her insinuations, anyway, but - why  _did_  I want to know if that was Nightingale? It wasn’t like it made a difference. The photo was more than ninety years old. Everyone else in it must be dead. And I’d sort of vaguely figured he was gay, or something like that, ever since the first time I’d met him; there hadn’t been any solid evidence for it, but there'd never been any evidence  _against_ , either. There was what Hugh Oswald had said about Molly, but I didn’t much rate that rumour.

I supposed it was more that like I’d told Lesley, Nightingale kept so quiet about his past. I didn’t think it was because he was hiding anything, exactly. I think it was just that it wasn’t a very comfortable subject to think about - everyone in it was dead, pretty much. And anyway, Nightingale wasn’t the type to talk about himself. But I did wonder what he’d been like, when he was our age, almost a century ago. It was hard to imagine Nightingale as a Bright Young Thing in the roaring twenties, dependable, workmanlike Nightingale, as Isis had once described him, but there he was in that photo, probably - young and handsome and happy, out on the town with…friends? A boyfriend or lover? Were any of the other men in the photo from the Folly? Had that been just the once, or a regular part of his life, when he was in London? I was so used to thinking of him as the inheritor of all that dusty old tradition, the idea that he might have been outside it in his own way, when he was young, that was…that was new. Of course it had been  _highly_  illegal, being gay, for blokes anyway, and plenty of people had gone to jail or worse for it. When Nightingale had been not much younger than me he could have legally done cocaine and not legally had sex, if he really was only into guys. It boggled my mind a bit to imagine him doing either, but there you were. 

So yeah, okay, I was curious. I was really curious. But I didn’t have the first clue how to ask. 

And like Lesley said - not really my business. 

*

I asked Beverley about it once, a long time later. I’d been cleaning out my email inbox - my personal email, not work - and spotted one from Lesley that I’d never opened. It had given me a start before I’d noted the date, and the attachment; it was that stupid photo. She’d emailed it to me from her phone and I’d never opened it. I was glad it was my personal account. The DPS had gone through my work email during the investigation, of course, which was technically ongoing, and I’d told them she never emailed me on my personal account; at the time I’d thought I was telling the truth. She’d forwarded me a couple of things, a long time ago, on this one. Nothing relevant. And - this. Well, thank god I’d forgotten, even if it did mean I’d inadvertently lied to them; there was no way I wanted to explain  _this_  to the DPS. 

“Do you think Nightingale might be gay?” I asked Beverley. I was over at her place - not her mum’s, Beverley’s own house, the one by her river. She couldn’t come into the main Folly, obviously, and shagging in the coach house was out for a whole lot of reasons, so we ended up at hers, when we had the time. Which was less often than you’d think and more often than should technically have been possible. We were in her garden right then, though. 

Beverley spluttered into her cider. “Where did  _that_  come from?” 

I supposed it was a bit out of context. I explained about the photo. Not about the email, though. Too complicated to get into. 

She thought about it. “ _I_ don’t know. I’ve never heard anything one way or another. Not that it’d be my place to tell you if I did know. But why do you even care?” 

“Just curious,” I said. “He doesn’t talk about himself much.”

“You shouldn’t pry,” Beverley said, almost primly – she's a great respecter of other people’s secrets, Beverley is. Probably because she has so many of her own. “Or if you’re going to pry you should just get on with it. He didn’t, like, hit on you or something?”

I gave her the look that deserved. “No, Christ – like he’d ever. He’s my _boss_.”

“Then if you want to know, just _ask_ him,” Beverley told me. “Or accept that it’s none of your business – because it’s not.”

It’s not that I’m not very fond of Beverley, but she’s really bafflingly uncurious about a lot of things. _Bafflingly_.

*

I did end up asking him, but it was more by accident than anything else. We were trying to identify a suspect at a magically-related crime scene via Instagram photos of the concert where it had all happened; the problem, as I was telling Nightingale, was the sheer volume of them.

“Bet this is a bit different from back in the day,” I said. “Being able to just pull up photos of an event like this – were people half as obsessed with taking pictures of themselves, back then?”

“Different, certainly,” Nightingale said. “But people would take photographs of anything, even back then, if they were the sort to own a camera. Themselves included. It’s more that _everybody_ carries one these days. It does make crime scenes a great deal easier, I’ll say that.”

“I bet it does,” I said, and then went on “Did you ever keep many photos?”

I knew where I was going with it, but I wasn’t sure I was going to commit. Still awkward, after all. 

“Not really,” he said. “I was rarely in one place for long enough, at least before the war.”

“I saw this old photo from the twenties and I think it was you,” I said before I could stop myself. Oops. Committed.  

“Really?” He just looked mildly curious. “Where on earth was that?”

“A, um, a historical display. When I went to look up those local records at the library, last year. Lesley took a picture of it and emailed it to me, and I found it the other day – I’d sort of forgotten about it.”

My hesitation over the ‘historical display’ part had caught his attention, but all he said was “I can’t imagine where it came from. Do you still have the photo?”

I’d come prepared for that, and I had it up on my tablet – zoomed in so it was just showing him. Lesley’s cameraphone hadn’t been that good and that much zoom made it a bit grainy, but I was hoping that we could avoid the context. That hope lasted about thirty seconds, because I have shown Nightingale stuff on the tablet before and he’s a quick study when he wants to be; it didn’t take him fifteen seconds to zoom back out and look at the whole thing.

“Where on earth did they get _this_?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised – but not upset. “The last time I saw a copy was before the war. Although I suppose perhaps – or maybe – no, I’ve no idea where they dug it up. I don’t have one myself.”

“Is it people from the Folly?” I tried, so we could pretend I wasn’t trying to find out if my boss was gay.

“I think you know perfectly well it’s not,” Nightingale said, very drily. “What sort of historical display _was_ this, exactly?”

“It was on LGBT culture in early-twentieth-century London,” I said, because I’m a coward and I know Nightingale ignores acronyms unless they’ve got real form – like scuba or laser, although come to that I don’t know if he knows what a laser is. But all he said was “Ah, that explains it,” which meant he probably knew perfectly well what it meant.

“How funny,” he went on, “to think of this as _history_. A library display. Good Lord.” Apparently I wasn’t saying anything a little too diligently, because he added “Peter – does this bother you?”

“No!” I said, too quickly, I knew. Not that I did much better as I stumbled on. “But I thought it might bother _you_ , I mean – it was sort of – I just wanted to know if it was you, not - um.”

It wasn’t like _he_ wanted to have that conversation either, I could tell, because we both pointedly stared at the table for a few seconds in mutual and awkward silence. Not the oh-god-I-fucked-up awkward kind, though, just the let’s-give-this-a-moment-and-move-on kind.

“There are other people from the Folly in this photo, though,” Nightingale said after a suitable interval had passed. He pointed. He’d already figured out about not touching touchscreens, just hovering. “That’s Andrew Cassidy. Didn’t even make it to the war – broke his neck taking a high hedge in thirty-seven.” I translated that as ‘horse-riding accident’. Pretty much what you deserved for recreationally spending time with excitable animals that weighed half a ton, in my opinion. That was _well_ after the invention of more sensible modes of transport. “And that’s David.”

He didn’t specify a surname, and I didn’t really need one – especially not since _David_ was the guy young Nightingale, the one in the photo, had his arm around. It was the first photo I’d seen of David Mellenby, and that was almost more interesting than anything else – I mean it. He didn’t look that remarkable. A white guy in his twenties, hair lighter than dark, the actual colour obscured by the black-and-white photo, eyes similarly indeterminate. You wouldn’t know he’d come close to reconciling magic and quantum mechanics, not from the photo. You wouldn’t know he’d killed himself two decades later – you might have guessed at it, given the context of this picture, but you’d never have guessed the reason.

“You know,” I said – instead of everything else I could have – “I think the library was looking for people who could identify who was in these pictures. You could be helpful.”

This time the look I got was sardonic. “I don’t think they’d believe me – do you?”

“You could say it was your uncle, or grandfather, or…whatever.”

“Most people get forgotten, eventually,” Nightingale said. “That’s how history goes. I remember who these people are. And now you know as well. That’s memory enough. Besides which - imagine if sixty years from now there was a historical display in some library and there was a photo of you out…what _do_ you call it these days?”

“Having fun?” He gave me a look. “Clubbing. Okay, I see your point. It’d be a _bit_ weird.”

I realised, then, exactly why I’d been so eager to figure out if it was him, in the photo. The thing about Nightingale is that he’s my boss, and my friend, in the way it’s possible to be friends with someone who’s your boss and also your teacher and housemate and co-owner of your dog and the only other person who does the same job as you. But sometimes it feels like I’m the only person who looks at him that way; he’s _the_ Nightingale, to most of the other people who know much about him, and Molly – I don’t even know what Molly thinks of him, exactly.

So I like these reminders that he’s human. That he’s not so different from me, really. That when I run into him at three am because I was getting a glass of water and he wasn’t sleeping, and his hair’s a bit messy and he looks all – approachable and normal – that I’m seeing something real about him, not something projected by my three am brain. Someone who used to be young and go out and do illegal (if not immoral by _my_ standards) things and be happy and 

– someone real.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] A Piece Of History](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6055660) by [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles), [Sixthlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight)




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